[3] While at Princeton in the mid-1950s, he wrote "Limited War", a, paper that argued for expansion of the conventional armies of Western Europe, instead of a reliance on nuclear weapons, to forestall an invasion by the Soviet Union.

The counterforce proposal stood in contrast to the massive retaliation approach advocated by United States Air Force General Curtis LeMay at Strategic Air Command in which the US response to a Soviet invasion, even one without nuclear attacks, would be nuclear weapons on all major military and civilian sites in the Soviet Union and its allies, which could have resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths.

[1] A 1986 article in Foreign Affairs called Kaufmann "the man who may well be the most knowledgeable individual in this country on the defense budgets of the past quarter-century.

"[2] In a report written with John D. Steinbruner in 1991 for the Brookings Institution, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kaufmann opined that the US could meet its post-Cold War defense obligations after cutting military spending by a third.

The report noted that "the future ability of the United States to maintain the conditions of its security will depend as much on its moral authority, diplomatic skills and economic assets as on its military capabilities.